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I have just returned from a very successful conference in Perth, the Digital Humanities Australasia, 2014. As with many conferences one comes away with a bunch of new information and contacts. Below is a quick recap on some of those significant highlights I gleaned from the past week.

Day One, Keynote One

Neil Freistat, University of Maryland “The Promise(s) of Digital Humanities”

A very welcomed provocation from Professor Freistat for the field of digital humanities, particularly as it begins to define itself from humanities studies. As I listened to Neil talk, the one thought that kept appearing was ‘definition is by way of exclusion’, in that something becomes by stating what it is not. In the past, a strong argument for digital humanities has been made as a field that utilises digital tools to assist in the study of humanities. However this has recently been criticised as being too simplistic to describe DH, with a flurry of definitions and rationales emerging (particularly as DH begins to attract research funding and appoint HDRs, ECRs, etc).

Nonetheless, debate has ensued around what DH actually is with much discussion placed on its lack of strategic vision. Freistat located his discussion in a utopianistic frame that provides futorities or promising notes, while also showing utopia’s inherent undoing in its makeup. He argued that without utopian vision there is no innovative thinking which does not lead to any turn in the field, which he notes has much momentum in the TransformDH Movement. When the utopian vision is then critiqued, a operationalised version of digital humanities is possible.

My new mantra: Less yack, more hack!

This set the tone well for the next few days, which also raised many questions around ontologies/topologies, archives/collections big/deep data, and although no one actually noticed it, the need for translation roles between different forms of expertise and knowledge.

Another interesting presentation by Anthony Beavers asked why philosophy as not been included in the digital humanities, since after all, philosophy had been using computational methods since Aristotle. By highlighting that philosophy is either empiricist – observational, (Aristotle, Occam, Locke, Hume) or rationalist – mathematical (Plato, Descartes, Leibniz), Beaver focussed on the rationalist philosopher. His examples included truth tables from circa 1850, through to more recent methods of computational philosophy and agent based modelling. It appears maths mixed with philosophy can reveal knowledge previously not known, as demonstrated by modelling the case of the class clown – computational philosophy says one class clown is entertaining and stimulates the environment whereas two is distracting and non-productive.

Given this provocation, Beaver argued that philosophy is at home in the digital humanities. He also noted it is the DHists that are rejecting the philosophers, but rather the philosophers that are ignoring DH.